I won't pretend to know who the next pope will be (of course), but I'm getting a guess at who it will NOT be.

Cardinal Tarcisso Bertone, Vatican Secretary of State, Italy. The very real banking scandal makes him look bad, and he'd be retiring in a year or two anyway, if Pope Benedict stayed healthy.

Cardinal Francois Arinze, President Emeritus of the Congregation for Divine Worship, Nigeria. If Benedict was suddenly struck down several years ago, Arinze would've been the presumptive pope. Several of the betting sites thought he was the favorite, until people started realizing that he's already retired.

Cardinal Peter Turkson, President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Ghana. His seemingly disqualifying comments to the British press probably were just journalists making controversy, but I can't help thinking that all the crowds who were so excited about a black pope mistook him for Arinze when they heard there was a black pope shoo-in years ago, and couldn't find Arinze among the papabile today; he's a rather low-ranking official. But unlike Arinze and Bertone, he's still viable.

Timothy Dolan, Sean O'Malley or any other American. But not because Rome will be biased against a super-power. It's because the American press has become very savvy and very unprincipled in generating Alinskyite ad-hominem attacks, as those against Paul Ryan, Sarah Palin, etc. And anything short of selling every possession of the Catholic church, converting it into paper bills, and throwing it off a building while shouting "Free money for anyone who will slander a priest!" will satisfy those who want not an end to the child abuse scandals, but an endless supply of heads to stick on pikes. There's no way they could "win" in the press. Witness, for instance, the way they labelled someone who risked his life to flee the Nazi Youths as a "Nazi Youth." A very dark horse candidate would be Raymond Burke, prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, the court of final appeal at the Vatican.

Who's viable?

Angelo Scola, Archbishop of Milan is the leading Italian.

Peter Erdo, Arcbhisop of Eztergom-Budapest and three-time president of the European Episcopal Conference is the leading European.

Luis Tagle, Archbishop of Manila is the leading developing world candidate.

Marc Ouellette, President of the Congregation for Bishops and former Archbishop of Quebec is the leading member of the Roman Curia (the papal "cabinet.")

George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney, Australia is the leading Anglophone, although even he is a very dark horse.

Malcom Cardinal Ranjith of Sri Lanka is more likely than Tagle of Manilla.

And Arinze is possilbe,despite his age. Not likely, but possible. Would get “gotta elect a black pope” monkey off our backs while electing someone who’s as conservative as Benedict was, with a new vote before long, when they can return to electing Italians.

I would consider this Cardinal from Argentina a favorite — Leonardo Sandri.

Sandri, 69, left for Rome at 27 and never came back to stay in Argentina. Initially trained as a canon lawyer, he reached the No. 3 spot in the church’s hierarchy under Pope John Paul II, the zenith of a long career in the Vatican’s diplomatic service ranging from Africa to Mexico to Washington.

As substitute secretary of state for seven years, he essentially served as the pope’s chief of staff, running the central office at the heart of the Vatican bureaucracy known as the Curia.

Sandri remains a consummate Vatican insider. Benedict promoted him to cardinal and named him to the Vatican’s Supreme Tribunal, which provides the second-to-last word on church law, after the pope. Sandri also is one of very few cardinals in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the rule-making bastion Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) led for many years before becoming pope.

The Catholic faithful probably best remember him as the “voice of the pope” who delivered papal speeches when John Paul II became too infirm, and it was Sandri who announced the beloved pope’s death to the crowd in St. Peter’s Square, adding the memorable observation that “we all feel like orphans this evening.”

One strike against Sandri -— He has never led a congregation, this will be a disadvantage for cardinals who want the next pope to have pastoral experience.

1. I can NOT wear the red shoes. I do not want to look like Dorothy.
2. Popemobile must go. I want something manly.
3. Holy Water must go. Too germy. Research has said so...
4. I will not live in Rome. Dirty city. I prefer a water view.

That is an example of a cardinal who is in his 60’s, this is why I put for a cardinal in 50-60’s age range, not way too old, someone who could hand major trips to far-flung Catholic communites plus be tech savvy in this age of social media.

That is an example of a cardinal who is in his 60s, this is why I put for a cardinal in 50-60s age range, not way too old, someone who could hand major trips to far-flung Catholic communites plus be tech savvy in this age of social media.

I personally agree but, by my count, only five of the top 45 oddsmaker-listed papabili are under 65. (Granted, you said "50-60s," not stopping at 65 like I did.) And two of those four are Americans (Dolan of NYC and Burke of St.Louis) generally thought to be no better than 50-to-1 shots. The other three are Ghanaian Cardinal Turkson, Quebec Cardinal Ouellet and youngster Cardinal Tagle of the Philippines.

Scherer is from a dysfunctional country although he has spent much of his career in Rome and not in Brazil.

However, he’s not conservative except by Brazilian standards. I will say that he has opposed abortion and some of the other things that are popular in Brazil, including some of their “charismatic” clergy, but he’s vague on world issues and is not up to being pope at least to some extent because his country is such a mess.

The only “Third World” people I think could do it would be Ranjith, who’s 67 (young enough but not too young), or Tagle, from the Phillipines. Arinze, who has spent much of his life in Rome, would probably be ok, but Turkson, head of the Peace and Justice Commission, is also from a dysfunctional country full of heresies and immoralities. Also, his big goal in life is a worldwide economic authority that would control everything.

Er, I don’t think so. African bishops need to do more about getting their own house in shape.

I seem to remember Schoenborn drew a public rebuke from the Vatican over an incident in the last few years. If memory serves, he reversed a local Catholic tribunal’s decision to exclude an openly gay man from serving on its board AND invited that man and his partner to lunch at Schoenborn’s palatial home. Although B16 (Ratzinger) and Schoenborn are decades-long friends, B16 felt it important to rebuke his old friend. I doubt Schoenborn can get a majority of the conclave to vote for him in light of the rebuke, whatever one makes of merits of the underlying dispute.

RE: Sandri is a serious liberal and was on the side of Marini and Bergoglio (the rivals to Ratzinger).

Just curious to know... how does one get chosen to be a member of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the one that oversees Catholic Church doctrine, whose offices are housed at the Palace of the Holy Office at the Vatican, when one is a liberal?

Sandri is not at CDF and never has been, but is in charge of the Oriental Churches. This is something else I would say he has not done very well, since they are in great distress because of Islamic attacks - and the entire world is just ignoring them. And what has he said?

I’m sorry, he is a member, but so are many other people who are not entirely orthodox, which was probably one of the things that led BXVI to resign. Sandri is and has been the Prefect of the Oriental Churches (to no effect) for a number of years now.

I read an interesting article that said that one of the reasons BXVI resigned was that he couldn’t move these people around anymore and he simply wanted to clear the decks (since technically they were all fired the day he resigned) and leave it open to a new pope to put in the right people without having any loyalty to holdovers.

One of the things that I think really stymied BXVI was the JPII holdovers, whom he couldn’t just get rid of and thus had to move from place to place. Perhaps if he had been more of a hatchet man, he could have done it...but that wasn’t his style.

I hope none of them gets to be pope, or we’ll be back to square one (when JPII was ailing and the Church was in free-fall).

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